You seem to dismiss that 5% that is left. That is where the real meat is. That is the information that people get killed over and wars are started with.
This makes sense to me.
A lot of heads of state were privy to that info and didn't flinch. They didn't think it was good enough. You and I don't have it, and the best evidence we have is that it wasn't enough evidence for most people to justify going to war.
Quote:
Originally posted by NaplesX
I would chose to beleive if two presidents from two ends of the political spectrum have taken similar action....
It's not really a fair comparison to say that Clinton and Bush took similar actions. Prior to the second Gulf War, Bush and Clinton had taken similar actions. Now there's absolutely no comparison.
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late.
He's saying we won't know until the strike, meaning any day now or a year from now.
It IS pretty clear which is why you should stop arguing with me. Any day or a year from now means he WASN'T saying the threat was imminent. The word imminent doesn't mean a year from now. "Any day or a year from now" means the nearness of the threat was not a known quantity. All he was saying is that the threat was real. He didn't say it was imminent.
It IS pretty clear which is why you should stop arguing with me. Any day or a year from now means he WASN'T saying the threat was imminent. The word imminent doesn't mean a year from now. "Any day or a year from now" means the nearness of the threat was not a known quantity. All he was saying is that the threat was real. He didn't say it was imminent.
I agree...
"im·mi·nent"
adj.
About to occur; impending: in imminent danger
"un·cer·tain"
adj.
1.\tNot known or established; questionable: domestic changes of great if uncertain consequences.
2.\tNot determined; undecided: uncertain plans.
3.\tNot having sure knowledge: an uncertain recollection of the sequence of events.
4.\tSubject to change; variable: uncertain weather.
"grow·ing, grows"
v. intr.
1.\tTo increase in size by a natural process.
2a.\tTo expand; gain: The business grew under new owners.
2b.\tTo increase in amount or degree; intensify: The suspense grew.
I think Giant's point is that open-source intelligence is the way things work now, and that analyzing open sources of information reveals patterns that make old-style forms of intelligence gathering less and less necessary.
It makes sense to you, of course, because you're more comfortable with the old pre-internet way of thinking about intelligence.
I suggest you thicken your skin a little, get over his tone and general demeanor, and take a good, honest look at what he's saying. As I said before, just because you don't like his tone doesn't mean he's wrong. At all.
Cheers
Scott
Then again, just because you agree with him and like his tone does not make him right.
What does "the old pre-internet way of thinking about intelligence" mean. Come on.
You are all fooling yourselves if you think that you can glean any real intelligence from these newsgroups or the internet. The internet is the breading ground for malcontents an conspiracy theorists. Right Giant?
There is nothing wrong with you disagreeing with the current administration. That goes to the heart of what this country was formed upon. Agree or disagree, but please don't hide behind some partisan talking points. And please don't try to tell us that you have some insight on the state of the world. Mr. Giant, you really should apply your special knowledge to something productive, instead of pontificating to a bunch of apple nuts. No offense to apple nuts, I am one.
More importantly, note that B includes the word "tyrant," with which he had effectively associated SH over several speeches. "Terrorists and tyrants" is more than alliteration. It's a way of associating 9/11 with SH to get the public to draw the conclusion that SH = terrorism, which, like 9/11, is an imminent threat.
Funny you should mention that. I recall Laura Bush's radio address after the Afghan invasion where she kept saying things like:
"Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish."
She had to make the "terrorists and the Taliban" connection over and over and over again because if she'd merely detailed the human rights abuses of the Taliban régime, the rubes might not have made that important mental connection to see that this all ties back to 9/11. Language matters, and the Bush team knows this all too well.
And to think that these are the same people who complained about "Slick Willy" and his "Clintonesque" parsing of language!
When Bush says, "Confronting Iraq is an urgent matter of national security," he means that it really isn't urgent at all. When Bush stands in front of big "Mission Accomplished" banner, he really means that we need to steel ourselves for a long hard slog. When Bush calls the Iraq situation a "crisis," he really means that there's no real hurry to take action.
Some social psychologist somewhere is definitely going to get a PhD thesis out of this administration.
When Bush says, "Confronting Iraq is an urgent matter of national security," he means that it really isn't urgent at all. When Bush stands in front of big "Mission Accomplished" banner, he really means that we need to steel ourselves for a long hard slog. When Bush calls the Iraq situation a "crisis," he really means that there's no real hurry to take action.
Indeed.
And when he says "we have to invade Iraq to keep them from using their weapons of mass destruction" he means it really doesn't matter if they have them or not. When he says that Hussein might give those weapons-that-don't-matter to international terrorists on a whim he means no need to panic. When Condi Rice says "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" she means the means the American people should look up what imminent means in the dictionary so there won't be any confusion later on.
Then again, just because you agree with him and like his tone does not make him right.
Indeed. I agree with him for a variety of reasons that have little to do with our agreement on some political issues. Similarly, I agree with Max Parrish about lots of things, and we disagree pretty violently about some political issues. He, too, seems to know what he's talking about, and what he has said in our recent exchanges has really made me think and re-think some of my positions on various issues.
Quote:
What does "the old pre-internet way of thinking about intelligence" mean. Come on.
It means that before the internet effectively democratized access to information, and before the mid and late 90s saw the use of the internet as a kind of clearing-house for information, and before the terrorists and white supremacists and whatever else whacko group chose to use the internet to dispense information, we had to go about intelligence gathering in different ways to a much greater extent than we do now.
Quote:
You are all fooling yourselves if you think that you can glean any real intelligence from these newsgroups or the internet. The internet is the breading ground for malcontents an conspiracy theorists. Right Giant?
I think the point here is that you're fooling yourself if you think a world-wide network of information out there, available to anyone who wants it, won't reveal a great deal to us about political and strategical patterns in international relations and the movements of non-nation states.
Quote:
There is nothing wrong with you disagreeing with the current administration. That goes to the heart of what this country was formed upon. Agree or disagree, but please don't hide behind some partisan talking points.
I hope you'll recognize that this nation was founded on PARTISANSHIP. We are not supposed to agree all the time. And you can't simply dismiss a certain line of disagreement with this blatantly partisan administration simply because it lines up with Democratic "talking points." One could say the same thing about most of your points. But back to the point. Were we to agree all the time, or even be cowed into agreeing all the time, minority opinions, as well as unpopular ones, would not be heard. More importantly, it is about doing more than paying lip service to the value of some opinion you disagree with. It is about listening to it and not dismissing it. This is sadly lacking on both sides of the aisle these days, mostly because there's no real difference between Republicans and Democrats at the national level, and so they have to invent smaller and smaller areas of turf to plant a flag into.
(For instance, if you think someone like Clinton, or just about anyone else in the Democratic party, was/is a "liberal" you have been utterly duped by whomever you're getting your information from. Seriously.)
Anyway, this idea of dialogue is thoroughly an Enlightenment one, and is rooted in the belief that understanding one another is the key to achieving man's perfection. Such understanding would also have the fringe benefit of us killing each other a whole lot less. In other words, it is generally better to try to understand the complaints of others against us, and then see if perhaps the problem might be rectified, than it is to just hack people to pieces whenever we disagree. Sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand. But sometimes, it's possible to solve a problem before you go after someone with a sword or a cruise missile.
It honestly sickens me to see many people, on both sides of the aisle, paint the opposition as idiotic. Sure, both sides of the debate have their loonies. But American liberalism (as articulated by Bunge, Giant, and me, for instance) and American conservatism (as articulated by Trumptman, Scott, SDW, sometimes FCiB, and almost always by Groverat [although his politics strike me as pretty nuanced]) both have long and deep philosophical origins and cannot simply be dismissed as stupid or wrong-headed.
I work hard, *hard* to understand the positions of those with whom I'm debating, not only because it is intellectually honest, but because I am all the better for it. Doing so keeps me from simply spouting off talking points of sound bytes without actually knowing what they mean.
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And please don't try to tell us that you have some insight on the state of the world. Mr. Giant, you really should apply your special knowledge to something productive, instead of pontificating to a bunch of apple nuts. No offense to apple nuts, I am one.
Golly you make a lot of assumptions. How do you know Mr. Giant *doesn't* do something more productive than offer to provide a reading list about the modern mode of intelligence gathering to people who might find such a thing interesting?
Maybe you should see what that reading list looks like? I know I'd like to see it. Giant? Any help?
1. I think the point here is that you're fooling yourself if you think a world-wide network of information out there, available to anyone who wants it, won't reveal a great deal to us about political and strategical patterns in international relations and the movements of non-nation states.
2. But American liberalism (as articulated by Bunge, Giant, and me, for instance) and American conservatism (as articulated by Trumptman, Scott, SDW, sometimes FCiB, and almost always by Groverat [although his politics strike me as pretty nuanced]) both have long and deep philosophical origins and cannot simply be dismissed as stupid or wrong-headed.
3. I work hard, *hard* to understand the positions of those with whom I'm debating, not only because it is intellectually honest, but because I am all the better for it. Doing so keeps me from simply spouting off talking points of sound bytes without actually knowing what they mean.
Cheers
Scott
Finally a bit of decorum.
1. We agree that the internet is a huge resource for just about any type of research. But it also is the perfect place to find others who agree with your point of view, no matter how skewed. Give me an hour or so and I bet I can find someone who will support me in the claim that GWB is an alien. And I'll bet they have a pretty good argument too. Are they right? Do we need to understand their point of view to see? Do we need to read the same books to draw a conclusion? Maybe I am wrong. But, no.
2. You point out something important here. IMO the truth lies somewhere in the middle. So if you find yourself leaning to one or the other side too often, you may want to evaluate your views.
3. You hit that nail. But in Giant's case, I immediately saw his bias and blatant self importance. Then came the thinly veiled partisan talking points. He obviously believes he is on the right track. I don't think anyone will dispute that he truly believes he is right. But they were just the same points disguised as the result of a super-human understanding of the world. Am I supposed to take him serious when he is so extremely and dissuasively pompous and partisan? Do I need to read all the same books he has to match his intellect? Am I less informed because maybe my opinions were formed based on other sources? One again the answer is NO.
Now see there, some agreement. That should be the purpose of a debate. Once again, in the case of some debating the facts here, their purpose is to defame and distort this president and his words.
Here is a test:
Can you say anything positive about this president? Has he done anything that is good for this country? Has he compromised on issues to move forward and make progress? Has he ever held a position you agree with?
If you answer no to all of these, than you are a partisan. If you answer no to most, you could be a partisan. Be honest with yourself. This can apply to all parties.
Intellectual honesty would force one to be honest with others. If Giant said "Hey I really can't stand this president because he is a republican. I am a liberal and I really cant see agreeing with anything he says or does.", that would be honest, and everyone would be able to judge for themselves if he is on the right track or not. What he is doing however is projecting some kind of special knowledge and assuming that that gives him some kind of impartiality. That is dishonest. Plain and simple.
There is no question he is intelligent. But, once again, that does not automatically make him credible or right. In my little debate with him he made it clear that he was so much smarter and well read than me or just about anyone else. Just as being a war hero does not make every subsequent thing you do right, same principle applies here.
It means that before the internet effectively democratized access to information, and before the mid and late 90s saw the use of the internet as a kind of clearing-house for information, and before the terrorists and white supremacists and whatever else whacko group chose to use the internet to dispense information, we had to go about intelligence gathering in different ways to a much greater extent than we do now?
I think the point here is that you're fooling yourself if you think a world-wide network of information out there, available to anyone who wants it, won't reveal a great deal to us about political and strategically patterns in international relations and the movements of non-nation states.
I can agree, to a point. The Internet is a wonderful way to obtain a survey of an issue and to identify likely avenues of research. In addition, there are arcane and unusual bits of information that one can find on the net, and it provides access to individuals that one might never meet, at least outside of a university or government agency.
However, I would never use it as a substitute for the formal treatment of a subject area. One course in say, economics or international relations, can immediately give one the theoretical knowledge and the intellectual tools needed to filter out crank theorists, discredited myths, questionable ?facts? etc.. Unfortunately, with the advent of the Internet, the crackpot lobby has probably quadrupled in the last decade. Why go to the University, hear a lecture, read an authoritative book, or even lookup a peer reviewed journal when one can spin endless blogs of speculation and half truths with the like minded?
The most authoritative (and costly) information is not freely available (or even published) on the net. In other words, the Internet, for some, simply provides an illusion of knowledge ? unsubstantiated data and theory without context or expertise.
(An amusing story. A friend of mine who is a U.S. history teacher goes ballistic when her students turn in papers with quotations of Rush Limbaugh on the Internet as an authority?)
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I hope you'll recognize that this nation was founded on PARTISANSHIP. We are not supposed to agree all the time. And you can't simply dismiss a certain line of disagreement with this blatantly partisan administration simply because it lines up with Democratic "talking points." One could say the same thing about most of your points?
Anyway, this idea of dialogue is thoroughly Enlightenment one, and is rooted in the belief that understanding one another is the key to achieving man's perfection. Such understanding would also have the fringe benefit of us killing each other a whole lot less. In other words, it is generally better to try to understand the complaints of others against us, and then see if perhaps the problem might be rectified, than it is to just hack people to pieces whenever we disagree. I work hard, *hard* to understand the positions of those with whom I'm debating, not only because it is intellectually honest, but because I am all the better for it. Doing so keeps me from simply spouting off talking points of sound bytes without actually knowing what they mean?
Golly you make a lot of assumptions. How do you know Mr. Giant *doesn't* do something more productive than offer to provide a reading list about the modern mode of intelligence gathering to people who might find such a thing interesting?
Maybe you should see what that reading list looks like?
Cheers
Scott [/B]
Except that talking points are almost always written to ?hack people to pieces? ? by their nature they are brief, somewhat superficial, and prone to simplistic positions (and data) that one can use to refute or establish a position. ?Understanding one another? is, obviously, a joint enterprise. If one or both parties wish to entertain themselves with inflammatory rhetoric, sarcasm, and banter ? enlivened with a few facts ? by all means toss in the talking points.
If one wants to truly understand another?s position, then it requires a far different tone and approach than Giants. Perhaps Naples confusion, as is mine, is that Giant is a bit of a skizo, sometimes in the same message he?ll bite your ass with ad homonym attacks, and then wonder why aren?t trusting of his offer of ?authoritative? resources.
Last point, I don?t really have a lot of patience for supercilious posturing. I also have a houseful of books, about 3,000. It would be easy to rudely dismiss a poster with ?Have you read ?x? ? or ?Do you know about Y?? but even if you think someone is woefully uninformed, then one can enlighten or mentor without humiliation?if you wish!
Max and Naples, the fundamental problem with your arguments is that you clearly don't even know what the major changes in information distribution have been. This isn't about newsgroups or websites. This big changes are:
1. The tremendous growth of interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan is not even available in many european libraries yet, while here in the US you can go to an academic library and get an obscure article from 4000 miles away photocopied and e.mailed to you in 24 hours (though only at libraries that have Ariel or Prospero set up to post online). That wasn't even possible 4 years ago.
2. The dramatically increased availability of journals and periodicals. If you have access to a major academic library, essentially everything past 1995 is online. That means every article from every journal published, from the new yorker to Neuropsychologia. You can pop in a nexis search and find every mention of the search item in every single news article. The general public can easily access this info during public hours at the local university library, and for researchers it is the revolutionary.
3. The availability of government documents online. You can just go to the UN site and get every single report from the inspection teams, for instance, within ten minutes and for free. It's fvcking unreal. So much important US government info is now published online. It's still probably less than 1/5-1/3 of what you would find at a depository, but it's pretty amazing nonetheless. In fact, since interlibrary loan is becoming so widespread and cheap (many public libraries offer it for ~$.25 per item) you can just have your library order it from any gov depository if it can't be found online.
4. The availability of global online news sources. It's always been the case that the main source of info for intel services has been open news sources. In the past, they were in a special place concerning access to these sources. Today, however, you can have instant access to not only news sources from Australia to India, but you have access to all sorts of small publications and blogs from people actually there. The Where is Raed? guy is a good example of this. But news sources are the biggie. This can be seen in...
5. Services like www.cooperativeresearch.org . Cooperative Research would have been impossible in the past. You have outlines and timelines consisting of nothing but snippets of info pulled from articles, articles that are directly linked to. It's really an amazing way to do a meta-analysis of news stories. It's really revolutionary in terms of citizen information access, since it basically does what intel analysts would do.
6. Services like Intel Online and Stratfor. These are basically pay news sources that also do analysis. Sometimes they are on, sometimes they are off. But they provide a service missing in major news sources, as seen in Stratfor's detailed coverage of troop movements during the Iraq war.
7. FAS and Global Security. They cross pollinate the info, and the two are amazing databases on global militaries. Stephen Aftergood is the nation's #1 fighter for FOIA and all of that info goes up there. Following sept. 11 there was quite a bit of talk about how dangerous FAS would be considering is what is up there. In the end, the detailed info on US and Israeli nuclear sites and nuclear devices were removed, but everything else is still up there.
There are many other things that are very good, too, but these really are the biggies, unless I've forgotten some things.
Actually, there were a couple things I forgot because they are so obvious:
8. Increased accessibly of monographs. You can find out about just about any book and buy it online for somewhere. For instance, on book I was looking for was only available at one small Italian retailer. I could find no copies in the US, but I was able to buy this book and get it shipped all the way from a small storefront on another continent. typically, however, you can just find out about a book, go to amazon or overstock and buy it within ten minutes. Even if it's out of print, amazon now has all the independent retailers you can just buy it from online. And if you still can't find it you have another option...
9. Email. Not enough can be said about it. Say you found out that so-and-so gave a speech at some university in Poland. Typically universities keep records of all of the lectures given, and there are many times that their archives will have a copy of it. First off, if they have it, isn't wild that you can just get them to ship you a copy? But that's not even the best part. Now, if they don't have a copy, what do you do? Email the speaker directly. This has even worked for books and journal articles I haven't been able to find. I've even seen a case where an article copy was provided by the person in charge of the deceased author's estate. Amazing.
Technology has improved access to info in ways most people haven't even begun to understand. Anyone in the US now has access to any piece of paper anywhere on the globe. This is exactly what PNAC folks are taking about when they say they need to gain control of the internet for political purposes. Everyone now has access to all of the same info.
But Iraq was easy compared to all of this. All of the admin claims on quantity and capability came from the UN inspections and, if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the only reason anyone came to the conclusion Iraq was hiding anything was, as I've already pointed out, the mistake of taking Wohlstetter's ideas concerning a nuclear standoff in a bipolar world and applying them to a variety of small, diverse groups and nations.
You see Giant you have done it again. You have no clue what Max or I or anyone else knows, yet you assume somehow you know. But anyway.
All your points are valid, and make sense. I anyone in the know would agree that the internet is a huge resource. However, to make the quantum jump that because you now have access to an almost unlimited amount of info (much of which cannot be substantiated), that you also have access to the most secret and guarded intel, and thus you can speak with authority about what this government does or does not know is a huge stretch.
Listen, I can contact some iraqi with internet access send him a web cam and start collecting "intel". I can get a email pen-pal and collect "intel". Anyone can. But can you as a citizen have access to communications as they happen or use your limited power to turn an agent to start feeding the most critical up to date info. No I think not. (well OK there is a remote possibility, however miniscule)
Once again, yes you can access 'intel' (by the way which can come from almost endless amount of sources) and yes, you can use your god given smarts to analyze that info and come to a conclusion, But to assume that you, without the critical 5% of hard intel, really know what's really going on, to me sounds presumptuous to the extreme.
This is the point where you lose everyone, or at least anyone that has his/her own thinking ability.
Follow me here:
Let's say you do have some position or job that is important and you know what you say you know or have some insight. How does you defaming the current president and his administration help this country? Do your spoutings help make us more secure? Are you helping the enemies of this country or hurting them?
If you were in a responsible position where you had privilege to this info you would only be there because you acted responsibly and could be trusted. So knowing that we can assess you are either not what you project, or a person that has this access and is extremely irresponsible. I think the first is the case.
Max and Naples, the fundamental problem with your arguments is that you clearly don't even know what the major changes in information distribution have been. This isn't about newsgroups or websites. This big changes are:
Thank you Giant. I?ve been out of school so long, I didn?t fully appreciate the range of authoritative resources available through the net. Of course, much of my off-hand research is in the area of American history, so direct access to books and older journal articles (as well as a little local fieldwork) is most helpful. But really, I am quite surprised at the range of resources.
One thing about ?hands-on? work, however, is that it provides its own serendipity. Thumbing through a card catalog (of which there are fewer), or browsing a library shelf or a stack of journals often leads (for me) to a far richer experience that just getting a specific item via mail or net. I guess, buried in a houseful of books, I?ve stayed a little old fashioned in my approach?never thought that day would come (sigh).
One last comment. I have found researching policy, theory, and opinion to be far easier than verifying facts and incidents. It's like peeling an onion. In my experience, someone writes a book on a controversial topic, it gets reviewed by several sharp experts in peer reviewed journals, and often the by the same people in TLS or NRBooks. The reviews often debunk the book, then a flurry of heated letters to the editor follow, with responses, for a couple of more issues - and one is left with the nagging feeling that the only real way to resolve it is to research and rewrite the book for oneself - obviously impractical.
You're talking absolute nonsense. Public domain information access in an open society is one thing, intelligence information from closed societies is another. And all of the parties you're with dealing with in the war on terror are authoritarian closed societies. Your nonsense about having access through the internet or some public library in the US to intelligence information about these closed societies is fsking retarded. And that Israeli nuclear thingy was made public some 20 years ago. And it has been written about and televised a zillion times. Big secret there.
As far as intel that is not classified, fine I will concede and really never argued that there is intel out there that enyone can grab. Is there a lot? Yes, do you need to analize it? Yes. Why? Because it is mundane info that on it's face means very little.
For example: some military vehicles leave am Iraqi military fixture and arive somewhere else. Now I am sure that that kind of thing happened on a daily if not hourly basis. Ask any Iraqi in that area. All that info is intel. Thare is tons of intel like that. Intercepted communications and the like will gather other intel. The analists put this all together and determine that in that movement there was possibly something of interest. Thus the 95% figure of open source intel you are talking about would make sense.
You seem to dismiss that 5% that is left. That is where the real meat is. That is the information that people get killed over and wars are started with.
This makes sense to me.
If GWB and company are in a conspiracy than Bill Clinton and company were in it to. He ordered Iraq be bombed for the same reasons years ago.
I would chose to beleive if two presidents from two ends of the political spectrum have taken similar action, I would have to say Iraq was a threat. The same intel was used before, are you complaining about that? No, because you are a partison parroting partison blather.
Once again this makes sense to me. [/B]
I would take issue with you that Clinton is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Bush. Clinton implemented more "Reagan-like" policies than Reagan himself did. His VP Algore agreed with Bush on >75% of all points raised in those pathetic "debates" just before the 2000 election. But thats not so much the point: When Clinton ordered the bombing raids in Iraq, much of that "intel" had been processed through the office of Robert Walpole who has in the past manipulated and distorted intelligence to fit the agendas of special interest groups, including the threat of "rogue nations acquiring missile technology" in order to promote the ongoing missile defense system gravytrain. Bush or Clinton or whoever...they are all answerable to the same suits.
You're talking absolute nonsense. Public domain information access in an open society is one thing, intelligence information from closed societies is another. And all of the parties you're with dealing with in the war on terror are authoritarian closed societies. Your nonsense about having access through the internet or some public library in the US to intelligence information about these closed societies is fsking retarded. And that Israeli nuclear thingy was made public some 20 years ago. And it has been written about and televised a zillion times. Big secret there.
Actually, the governments aren't the problem, it's finding out about people in those countries that can be tricky. That's why finding out about al-qaeda pre-9.11 was difficult, yet finding out about Iraq was relatively easy. Of course, following 9.11 we actually got good insight because al-qaeda has such a close relationship to the SAS. It's actually very telling that the ties to the pakistan government are actually exactly what made info much more readily accessible.
Of course, the amount of deception used makes it difficult to get a complete picture without collecting from a broad range of sources, which is always necessary. A good example is the collection on cooperative research concerning Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Putting it together and seeing the patterns and, thus, isolating the facts from falsehoods reveal the truth behind the situation. This is *exactly* what all of the intel agencies did. In other words, you can go to cooperative research and see exactly how an intel service gets to the bottom of a incident.
Now Iran, I don't know much about. I've read a few papers from people in the former Iranian government. But they, like many current gulf leaders, are very embedded in academia and you can find what you need if you know where to look.
Iraq has been an open book for a long time. In fact, now that we are there we can see that everything we knew before was exactly what was going on.
Now, IIRC, you are from Israel, where deception is a major tool and intel collection has a much larger emphasis on human intel, for obvious reasons. Israeli intel stands out primarily for its use of deception. Other intel agencies utilize deception extensively, but Israel is is a league of its own.
But Iraq was easy compared to all of this. All of the admin claims on quantity and capability came from the UN inspections and, if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the only reason anyone came to the conclusion Iraq was hiding anything was, as I've already pointed out, the mistake of taking Wohlstetter's ideas concerning a nuclear standoff in a bipolar world and applying them to a variety of small, diverse groups and nations.
There are several lines of your argument I?d like to be illuminated?let?s start with Wohlstetter. Now, all I know about Wohlsetter is that he was the leading 50s-70s theorist on nuclear war strategy, a critic of MAD, and a mentor to several foreign policy thinkers, e.g. Wolfawietz and Pearle (spes?) (my previous exposure to those theories have been through the writings of H. Kahn and an occasional article in specialized periodicals).
My first question is:
What were, and how were his ideas that have been ?misapplied? in the current context?
There are several lines of your argument I?d like to be illuminated?let?s start with Wohlstetter. Now, all I know about Wohlsetter is that he was the leading 50s-70s theorist on nuclear war strategy, a critic of MAD, and a mentor to several foreign policy thinkers, e.g. Wolfawietz and Pearle (spes?) (my previous exposure to those theories have been through the writings of H. Kahn and an occasional article in specialized periodicals).
My first question is:
What were, and how were his ideas that have been ?misapplied? in the current context?
It's actually pretty simple. Wohlstetter's central thesis was that we need to have a zero margin of error in a nuclear world. This meant you had to deal with every situation according to the worst-case scenario. Wolfowitz argued that this should be applied to proliferation and, more shockingly, power.
The other major influence was Shulsky's (and all of the other straussians, including wolfowitz) interpretation of Strauss with regard to intelligence, essentially adopting a hyper-paranoid view of intel where you assume that basically everything is complete deception and the only way to get any info is to read between the lines.
The biggest problem with how these views were adopted was the extreme to which they were (are) followed. Iraq was an open book, and that was obvious. Certain individuals in the US government were too blinded by these ideological beliefs to realize that.*
Brzezinski described the problems with this very well at the NASSP conference:
Quote:
The second condition, troubling condition, which contributes in my view to the crisis of credibility and to the state of isolation in which the United States finds itself today is due in part because that skewed view of the world is intensified by a fear that periodically verges on panic that is in itself blind. By this I mean the absence of a clearly, sharply defined perception of what is transpiring abroad regarding particularly such critically important security issues as the existence or the spread or the availability or the readiness in alien hands of weapons of mass destruction.
We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States. That failure was contributed to and was compensated for by extremist demagogy which emphasizes the worst case scenarios which stimulates fear, which induces a very simple dichotomic view of world reality.
*This is not to say that there was no deception, since clearly there was. But the primary thrust was in the opposite direction with Saddam working to make it appear Iraq was better armed than it was.
Iraq has been an open book for a long time. In fact, now that we are there we can see that everything we knew before was exactly what was going on.
WRONG!
It's exactly the opposite. And if you did even the most elementary thinking about the subject let alone have access to intelligence information, you would know that. Saddam used intelligence deception very successfully, and the fact that the US is now having to pump unforeseen billions into that project testifies to that successful deception.
Comments
Originally posted by NaplesX
You seem to dismiss that 5% that is left. That is where the real meat is. That is the information that people get killed over and wars are started with.
This makes sense to me.
A lot of heads of state were privy to that info and didn't flinch. They didn't think it was good enough. You and I don't have it, and the best evidence we have is that it wasn't enough evidence for most people to justify going to war.
Originally posted by NaplesX
I would chose to beleive if two presidents from two ends of the political spectrum have taken similar action....
It's not really a fair comparison to say that Clinton and Bush took similar actions. Prior to the second Gulf War, Bush and Clinton had taken similar actions. Now there's absolutely no comparison.
Originally posted by giant
... Actually, it's pretty clear:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late.
He's saying we won't know until the strike, meaning any day now or a year from now.
It IS pretty clear which is why you should stop arguing with me. Any day or a year from now means he WASN'T saying the threat was imminent. The word imminent doesn't mean a year from now. "Any day or a year from now" means the nearness of the threat was not a known quantity. All he was saying is that the threat was real. He didn't say it was imminent.
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
It IS pretty clear which is why you should stop arguing with me. Any day or a year from now means he WASN'T saying the threat was imminent. The word imminent doesn't mean a year from now. "Any day or a year from now" means the nearness of the threat was not a known quantity. All he was saying is that the threat was real. He didn't say it was imminent.
I agree...
"im·mi·nent"
adj.
About to occur; impending: in imminent danger
"un·cer·tain"
adj.
1.\tNot known or established; questionable: domestic changes of great if uncertain consequences.
2.\tNot determined; undecided: uncertain plans.
3.\tNot having sure knowledge: an uncertain recollection of the sequence of events.
4.\tSubject to change; variable: uncertain weather.
"grow·ing, grows"
v. intr.
1.\tTo increase in size by a natural process.
2a.\tTo expand; gain: The business grew under new owners.
2b.\tTo increase in amount or degree; intensify: The suspense grew.
3.\tTo develop and reach maturity.
Game,set, match. Well done.
Originally posted by midwinter
I think Giant's point is that open-source intelligence is the way things work now, and that analyzing open sources of information reveals patterns that make old-style forms of intelligence gathering less and less necessary.
It makes sense to you, of course, because you're more comfortable with the old pre-internet way of thinking about intelligence.
I suggest you thicken your skin a little, get over his tone and general demeanor, and take a good, honest look at what he's saying. As I said before, just because you don't like his tone doesn't mean he's wrong. At all.
Cheers
Scott
Then again, just because you agree with him and like his tone does not make him right.
What does "the old pre-internet way of thinking about intelligence" mean. Come on.
You are all fooling yourselves if you think that you can glean any real intelligence from these newsgroups or the internet. The internet is the breading ground for malcontents an conspiracy theorists. Right Giant?
There is nothing wrong with you disagreeing with the current administration. That goes to the heart of what this country was formed upon. Agree or disagree, but please don't hide behind some partisan talking points. And please don't try to tell us that you have some insight on the state of the world. Mr. Giant, you really should apply your special knowledge to something productive, instead of pontificating to a bunch of apple nuts. No offense to apple nuts, I am one.
Originally posted by midwinter
More importantly, note that B includes the word "tyrant," with which he had effectively associated SH over several speeches. "Terrorists and tyrants" is more than alliteration. It's a way of associating 9/11 with SH to get the public to draw the conclusion that SH = terrorism, which, like 9/11, is an imminent threat.
Funny you should mention that. I recall Laura Bush's radio address after the Afghan invasion where she kept saying things like:
"Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish."
She had to make the "terrorists and the Taliban" connection over and over and over again because if she'd merely detailed the human rights abuses of the Taliban régime, the rubes might not have made that important mental connection to see that this all ties back to 9/11. Language matters, and the Bush team knows this all too well.
And to think that these are the same people who complained about "Slick Willy" and his "Clintonesque" parsing of language!
When Bush says, "Confronting Iraq is an urgent matter of national security," he means that it really isn't urgent at all. When Bush stands in front of big "Mission Accomplished" banner, he really means that we need to steel ourselves for a long hard slog. When Bush calls the Iraq situation a "crisis," he really means that there's no real hurry to take action.
Some social psychologist somewhere is definitely going to get a PhD thesis out of this administration.
Originally posted by Josef K.
When Bush says, "Confronting Iraq is an urgent matter of national security," he means that it really isn't urgent at all. When Bush stands in front of big "Mission Accomplished" banner, he really means that we need to steel ourselves for a long hard slog. When Bush calls the Iraq situation a "crisis," he really means that there's no real hurry to take action.
Indeed.
And when he says "we have to invade Iraq to keep them from using their weapons of mass destruction" he means it really doesn't matter if they have them or not. When he says that Hussein might give those weapons-that-don't-matter to international terrorists on a whim he means no need to panic. When Condi Rice says "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" she means the means the American people should look up what imminent means in the dictionary so there won't be any confusion later on.
Originally posted by NaplesX
Then again, just because you agree with him and like his tone does not make him right.
Indeed. I agree with him for a variety of reasons that have little to do with our agreement on some political issues. Similarly, I agree with Max Parrish about lots of things, and we disagree pretty violently about some political issues. He, too, seems to know what he's talking about, and what he has said in our recent exchanges has really made me think and re-think some of my positions on various issues.
What does "the old pre-internet way of thinking about intelligence" mean. Come on.
It means that before the internet effectively democratized access to information, and before the mid and late 90s saw the use of the internet as a kind of clearing-house for information, and before the terrorists and white supremacists and whatever else whacko group chose to use the internet to dispense information, we had to go about intelligence gathering in different ways to a much greater extent than we do now.
You are all fooling yourselves if you think that you can glean any real intelligence from these newsgroups or the internet. The internet is the breading ground for malcontents an conspiracy theorists. Right Giant?
I think the point here is that you're fooling yourself if you think a world-wide network of information out there, available to anyone who wants it, won't reveal a great deal to us about political and strategical patterns in international relations and the movements of non-nation states.
There is nothing wrong with you disagreeing with the current administration. That goes to the heart of what this country was formed upon. Agree or disagree, but please don't hide behind some partisan talking points.
I hope you'll recognize that this nation was founded on PARTISANSHIP. We are not supposed to agree all the time. And you can't simply dismiss a certain line of disagreement with this blatantly partisan administration simply because it lines up with Democratic "talking points." One could say the same thing about most of your points. But back to the point. Were we to agree all the time, or even be cowed into agreeing all the time, minority opinions, as well as unpopular ones, would not be heard. More importantly, it is about doing more than paying lip service to the value of some opinion you disagree with. It is about listening to it and not dismissing it. This is sadly lacking on both sides of the aisle these days, mostly because there's no real difference between Republicans and Democrats at the national level, and so they have to invent smaller and smaller areas of turf to plant a flag into.
(For instance, if you think someone like Clinton, or just about anyone else in the Democratic party, was/is a "liberal" you have been utterly duped by whomever you're getting your information from. Seriously.)
Anyway, this idea of dialogue is thoroughly an Enlightenment one, and is rooted in the belief that understanding one another is the key to achieving man's perfection. Such understanding would also have the fringe benefit of us killing each other a whole lot less. In other words, it is generally better to try to understand the complaints of others against us, and then see if perhaps the problem might be rectified, than it is to just hack people to pieces whenever we disagree. Sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand. But sometimes, it's possible to solve a problem before you go after someone with a sword or a cruise missile.
It honestly sickens me to see many people, on both sides of the aisle, paint the opposition as idiotic. Sure, both sides of the debate have their loonies. But American liberalism (as articulated by Bunge, Giant, and me, for instance) and American conservatism (as articulated by Trumptman, Scott, SDW, sometimes FCiB, and almost always by Groverat [although his politics strike me as pretty nuanced]) both have long and deep philosophical origins and cannot simply be dismissed as stupid or wrong-headed.
I work hard, *hard* to understand the positions of those with whom I'm debating, not only because it is intellectually honest, but because I am all the better for it. Doing so keeps me from simply spouting off talking points of sound bytes without actually knowing what they mean.
And please don't try to tell us that you have some insight on the state of the world. Mr. Giant, you really should apply your special knowledge to something productive, instead of pontificating to a bunch of apple nuts. No offense to apple nuts, I am one.
Golly you make a lot of assumptions. How do you know Mr. Giant *doesn't* do something more productive than offer to provide a reading list about the modern mode of intelligence gathering to people who might find such a thing interesting?
Maybe you should see what that reading list looks like? I know I'd like to see it. Giant? Any help?
Cheers
Scott
Originally posted by midwinter
1. I think the point here is that you're fooling yourself if you think a world-wide network of information out there, available to anyone who wants it, won't reveal a great deal to us about political and strategical patterns in international relations and the movements of non-nation states.
2. But American liberalism (as articulated by Bunge, Giant, and me, for instance) and American conservatism (as articulated by Trumptman, Scott, SDW, sometimes FCiB, and almost always by Groverat [although his politics strike me as pretty nuanced]) both have long and deep philosophical origins and cannot simply be dismissed as stupid or wrong-headed.
3. I work hard, *hard* to understand the positions of those with whom I'm debating, not only because it is intellectually honest, but because I am all the better for it. Doing so keeps me from simply spouting off talking points of sound bytes without actually knowing what they mean.
Cheers
Scott
Finally a bit of decorum.
1. We agree that the internet is a huge resource for just about any type of research. But it also is the perfect place to find others who agree with your point of view, no matter how skewed. Give me an hour or so and I bet I can find someone who will support me in the claim that GWB is an alien. And I'll bet they have a pretty good argument too. Are they right? Do we need to understand their point of view to see? Do we need to read the same books to draw a conclusion? Maybe I am wrong. But, no.
2. You point out something important here. IMO the truth lies somewhere in the middle. So if you find yourself leaning to one or the other side too often, you may want to evaluate your views.
3. You hit that nail. But in Giant's case, I immediately saw his bias and blatant self importance. Then came the thinly veiled partisan talking points. He obviously believes he is on the right track. I don't think anyone will dispute that he truly believes he is right. But they were just the same points disguised as the result of a super-human understanding of the world. Am I supposed to take him serious when he is so extremely and dissuasively pompous and partisan? Do I need to read all the same books he has to match his intellect? Am I less informed because maybe my opinions were formed based on other sources? One again the answer is NO.
Now see there, some agreement. That should be the purpose of a debate. Once again, in the case of some debating the facts here, their purpose is to defame and distort this president and his words.
Here is a test:
Can you say anything positive about this president? Has he done anything that is good for this country? Has he compromised on issues to move forward and make progress? Has he ever held a position you agree with?
If you answer no to all of these, than you are a partisan. If you answer no to most, you could be a partisan. Be honest with yourself. This can apply to all parties.
Intellectual honesty would force one to be honest with others. If Giant said "Hey I really can't stand this president because he is a republican. I am a liberal and I really cant see agreeing with anything he says or does.", that would be honest, and everyone would be able to judge for themselves if he is on the right track or not. What he is doing however is projecting some kind of special knowledge and assuming that that gives him some kind of impartiality. That is dishonest. Plain and simple.
There is no question he is intelligent. But, once again, that does not automatically make him credible or right. In my little debate with him he made it clear that he was so much smarter and well read than me or just about anyone else. Just as being a war hero does not make every subsequent thing you do right, same principle applies here.
Originally posted by midwinter
It means that before the internet effectively democratized access to information, and before the mid and late 90s saw the use of the internet as a kind of clearing-house for information, and before the terrorists and white supremacists and whatever else whacko group chose to use the internet to dispense information, we had to go about intelligence gathering in different ways to a much greater extent than we do now?
I think the point here is that you're fooling yourself if you think a world-wide network of information out there, available to anyone who wants it, won't reveal a great deal to us about political and strategically patterns in international relations and the movements of non-nation states.
I can agree, to a point. The Internet is a wonderful way to obtain a survey of an issue and to identify likely avenues of research. In addition, there are arcane and unusual bits of information that one can find on the net, and it provides access to individuals that one might never meet, at least outside of a university or government agency.
However, I would never use it as a substitute for the formal treatment of a subject area. One course in say, economics or international relations, can immediately give one the theoretical knowledge and the intellectual tools needed to filter out crank theorists, discredited myths, questionable ?facts? etc.. Unfortunately, with the advent of the Internet, the crackpot lobby has probably quadrupled in the last decade. Why go to the University, hear a lecture, read an authoritative book, or even lookup a peer reviewed journal when one can spin endless blogs of speculation and half truths with the like minded?
The most authoritative (and costly) information is not freely available (or even published) on the net. In other words, the Internet, for some, simply provides an illusion of knowledge ? unsubstantiated data and theory without context or expertise.
(An amusing story. A friend of mine who is a U.S. history teacher goes ballistic when her students turn in papers with quotations of Rush Limbaugh on the Internet as an authority?)
I hope you'll recognize that this nation was founded on PARTISANSHIP. We are not supposed to agree all the time. And you can't simply dismiss a certain line of disagreement with this blatantly partisan administration simply because it lines up with Democratic "talking points." One could say the same thing about most of your points?
Anyway, this idea of dialogue is thoroughly Enlightenment one, and is rooted in the belief that understanding one another is the key to achieving man's perfection. Such understanding would also have the fringe benefit of us killing each other a whole lot less. In other words, it is generally better to try to understand the complaints of others against us, and then see if perhaps the problem might be rectified, than it is to just hack people to pieces whenever we disagree. I work hard, *hard* to understand the positions of those with whom I'm debating, not only because it is intellectually honest, but because I am all the better for it. Doing so keeps me from simply spouting off talking points of sound bytes without actually knowing what they mean?
Golly you make a lot of assumptions. How do you know Mr. Giant *doesn't* do something more productive than offer to provide a reading list about the modern mode of intelligence gathering to people who might find such a thing interesting?
Maybe you should see what that reading list looks like?
Cheers
Scott [/B]
Except that talking points are almost always written to ?hack people to pieces? ? by their nature they are brief, somewhat superficial, and prone to simplistic positions (and data) that one can use to refute or establish a position. ?Understanding one another? is, obviously, a joint enterprise. If one or both parties wish to entertain themselves with inflammatory rhetoric, sarcasm, and banter ? enlivened with a few facts ? by all means toss in the talking points.
If one wants to truly understand another?s position, then it requires a far different tone and approach than Giants. Perhaps Naples confusion, as is mine, is that Giant is a bit of a skizo, sometimes in the same message he?ll bite your ass with ad homonym attacks, and then wonder why aren?t trusting of his offer of ?authoritative? resources.
Last point, I don?t really have a lot of patience for supercilious posturing. I also have a houseful of books, about 3,000. It would be easy to rudely dismiss a poster with ?Have you read ?x? ? or ?Do you know about Y?? but even if you think someone is woefully uninformed, then one can enlighten or mentor without humiliation?if you wish!
It's called backtracking.
It's telling when the big republican campaign strategist on the McGaughlin groups says "Gearge Tenet will be out of the CIA by December".
The buck stops at the CIA?
1. The tremendous growth of interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan is not even available in many european libraries yet, while here in the US you can go to an academic library and get an obscure article from 4000 miles away photocopied and e.mailed to you in 24 hours (though only at libraries that have Ariel or Prospero set up to post online). That wasn't even possible 4 years ago.
2. The dramatically increased availability of journals and periodicals. If you have access to a major academic library, essentially everything past 1995 is online. That means every article from every journal published, from the new yorker to Neuropsychologia. You can pop in a nexis search and find every mention of the search item in every single news article. The general public can easily access this info during public hours at the local university library, and for researchers it is the revolutionary.
3. The availability of government documents online. You can just go to the UN site and get every single report from the inspection teams, for instance, within ten minutes and for free. It's fvcking unreal. So much important US government info is now published online. It's still probably less than 1/5-1/3 of what you would find at a depository, but it's pretty amazing nonetheless. In fact, since interlibrary loan is becoming so widespread and cheap (many public libraries offer it for ~$.25 per item) you can just have your library order it from any gov depository if it can't be found online.
4. The availability of global online news sources. It's always been the case that the main source of info for intel services has been open news sources. In the past, they were in a special place concerning access to these sources. Today, however, you can have instant access to not only news sources from Australia to India, but you have access to all sorts of small publications and blogs from people actually there. The Where is Raed? guy is a good example of this. But news sources are the biggie. This can be seen in...
5. Services like www.cooperativeresearch.org . Cooperative Research would have been impossible in the past. You have outlines and timelines consisting of nothing but snippets of info pulled from articles, articles that are directly linked to. It's really an amazing way to do a meta-analysis of news stories. It's really revolutionary in terms of citizen information access, since it basically does what intel analysts would do.
6. Services like Intel Online and Stratfor. These are basically pay news sources that also do analysis. Sometimes they are on, sometimes they are off. But they provide a service missing in major news sources, as seen in Stratfor's detailed coverage of troop movements during the Iraq war.
7. FAS and Global Security. They cross pollinate the info, and the two are amazing databases on global militaries. Stephen Aftergood is the nation's #1 fighter for FOIA and all of that info goes up there. Following sept. 11 there was quite a bit of talk about how dangerous FAS would be considering is what is up there. In the end, the detailed info on US and Israeli nuclear sites and nuclear devices were removed, but everything else is still up there.
There are many other things that are very good, too, but these really are the biggies, unless I've forgotten some things.
8. Increased accessibly of monographs. You can find out about just about any book and buy it online for somewhere. For instance, on book I was looking for was only available at one small Italian retailer. I could find no copies in the US, but I was able to buy this book and get it shipped all the way from a small storefront on another continent. typically, however, you can just find out about a book, go to amazon or overstock and buy it within ten minutes. Even if it's out of print, amazon now has all the independent retailers you can just buy it from online. And if you still can't find it you have another option...
9. Email. Not enough can be said about it. Say you found out that so-and-so gave a speech at some university in Poland. Typically universities keep records of all of the lectures given, and there are many times that their archives will have a copy of it. First off, if they have it, isn't wild that you can just get them to ship you a copy? But that's not even the best part. Now, if they don't have a copy, what do you do? Email the speaker directly. This has even worked for books and journal articles I haven't been able to find. I've even seen a case where an article copy was provided by the person in charge of the deceased author's estate. Amazing.
Technology has improved access to info in ways most people haven't even begun to understand. Anyone in the US now has access to any piece of paper anywhere on the globe. This is exactly what PNAC folks are taking about when they say they need to gain control of the internet for political purposes. Everyone now has access to all of the same info.
But Iraq was easy compared to all of this. All of the admin claims on quantity and capability came from the UN inspections and, if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the only reason anyone came to the conclusion Iraq was hiding anything was, as I've already pointed out, the mistake of taking Wohlstetter's ideas concerning a nuclear standoff in a bipolar world and applying them to a variety of small, diverse groups and nations.
All your points are valid, and make sense. I anyone in the know would agree that the internet is a huge resource. However, to make the quantum jump that because you now have access to an almost unlimited amount of info (much of which cannot be substantiated), that you also have access to the most secret and guarded intel, and thus you can speak with authority about what this government does or does not know is a huge stretch.
Listen, I can contact some iraqi with internet access send him a web cam and start collecting "intel". I can get a email pen-pal and collect "intel". Anyone can. But can you as a citizen have access to communications as they happen or use your limited power to turn an agent to start feeding the most critical up to date info. No I think not. (well OK there is a remote possibility, however miniscule)
Once again, yes you can access 'intel' (by the way which can come from almost endless amount of sources) and yes, you can use your god given smarts to analyze that info and come to a conclusion, But to assume that you, without the critical 5% of hard intel, really know what's really going on, to me sounds presumptuous to the extreme.
This is the point where you lose everyone, or at least anyone that has his/her own thinking ability.
Follow me here:
Let's say you do have some position or job that is important and you know what you say you know or have some insight. How does you defaming the current president and his administration help this country? Do your spoutings help make us more secure? Are you helping the enemies of this country or hurting them?
If you were in a responsible position where you had privilege to this info you would only be there because you acted responsibly and could be trusted. So knowing that we can assess you are either not what you project, or a person that has this access and is extremely irresponsible. I think the first is the case.
my two centavos....
Originally posted by giant
Max and Naples, the fundamental problem with your arguments is that you clearly don't even know what the major changes in information distribution have been. This isn't about newsgroups or websites. This big changes are:
Thank you Giant. I?ve been out of school so long, I didn?t fully appreciate the range of authoritative resources available through the net. Of course, much of my off-hand research is in the area of American history, so direct access to books and older journal articles (as well as a little local fieldwork) is most helpful. But really, I am quite surprised at the range of resources.
One thing about ?hands-on? work, however, is that it provides its own serendipity. Thumbing through a card catalog (of which there are fewer), or browsing a library shelf or a stack of journals often leads (for me) to a far richer experience that just getting a specific item via mail or net. I guess, buried in a houseful of books, I?ve stayed a little old fashioned in my approach?never thought that day would come (sigh).
One last comment. I have found researching policy, theory, and opinion to be far easier than verifying facts and incidents. It's like peeling an onion. In my experience, someone writes a book on a controversial topic, it gets reviewed by several sharp experts in peer reviewed journals, and often the by the same people in TLS or NRBooks. The reviews often debunk the book, then a flurry of heated letters to the editor follow, with responses, for a couple of more issues - and one is left with the nagging feeling that the only real way to resolve it is to research and rewrite the book for oneself - obviously impractical.
Thanks again.
You're talking absolute nonsense. Public domain information access in an open society is one thing, intelligence information from closed societies is another. And all of the parties you're with dealing with in the war on terror are authoritarian closed societies. Your nonsense about having access through the internet or some public library in the US to intelligence information about these closed societies is fsking retarded. And that Israeli nuclear thingy was made public some 20 years ago. And it has been written about and televised a zillion times. Big secret there.
As far as intel that is not classified, fine I will concede and really never argued that there is intel out there that enyone can grab. Is there a lot? Yes, do you need to analize it? Yes. Why? Because it is mundane info that on it's face means very little.
For example: some military vehicles leave am Iraqi military fixture and arive somewhere else. Now I am sure that that kind of thing happened on a daily if not hourly basis. Ask any Iraqi in that area. All that info is intel. Thare is tons of intel like that. Intercepted communications and the like will gather other intel. The analists put this all together and determine that in that movement there was possibly something of interest. Thus the 95% figure of open source intel you are talking about would make sense.
You seem to dismiss that 5% that is left. That is where the real meat is. That is the information that people get killed over and wars are started with.
This makes sense to me.
If GWB and company are in a conspiracy than Bill Clinton and company were in it to. He ordered Iraq be bombed for the same reasons years ago.
I would chose to beleive if two presidents from two ends of the political spectrum have taken similar action, I would have to say Iraq was a threat. The same intel was used before, are you complaining about that? No, because you are a partison parroting partison blather.
Once again this makes sense to me. [/B]
I would take issue with you that Clinton is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Bush. Clinton implemented more "Reagan-like" policies than Reagan himself did. His VP Algore agreed with Bush on >75% of all points raised in those pathetic "debates" just before the 2000 election. But thats not so much the point: When Clinton ordered the bombing raids in Iraq, much of that "intel" had been processed through the office of Robert Walpole who has in the past manipulated and distorted intelligence to fit the agendas of special interest groups, including the threat of "rogue nations acquiring missile technology" in order to promote the ongoing missile defense system gravytrain. Bush or Clinton or whoever...they are all answerable to the same suits.
Originally posted by aapl
Giant,
You're talking absolute nonsense. Public domain information access in an open society is one thing, intelligence information from closed societies is another. And all of the parties you're with dealing with in the war on terror are authoritarian closed societies. Your nonsense about having access through the internet or some public library in the US to intelligence information about these closed societies is fsking retarded. And that Israeli nuclear thingy was made public some 20 years ago. And it has been written about and televised a zillion times. Big secret there.
Actually, the governments aren't the problem, it's finding out about people in those countries that can be tricky. That's why finding out about al-qaeda pre-9.11 was difficult, yet finding out about Iraq was relatively easy. Of course, following 9.11 we actually got good insight because al-qaeda has such a close relationship to the SAS. It's actually very telling that the ties to the pakistan government are actually exactly what made info much more readily accessible.
Of course, the amount of deception used makes it difficult to get a complete picture without collecting from a broad range of sources, which is always necessary. A good example is the collection on cooperative research concerning Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Putting it together and seeing the patterns and, thus, isolating the facts from falsehoods reveal the truth behind the situation. This is *exactly* what all of the intel agencies did. In other words, you can go to cooperative research and see exactly how an intel service gets to the bottom of a incident.
Now Iran, I don't know much about. I've read a few papers from people in the former Iranian government. But they, like many current gulf leaders, are very embedded in academia and you can find what you need if you know where to look.
Iraq has been an open book for a long time. In fact, now that we are there we can see that everything we knew before was exactly what was going on.
Now, IIRC, you are from Israel, where deception is a major tool and intel collection has a much larger emphasis on human intel, for obvious reasons. Israeli intel stands out primarily for its use of deception. Other intel agencies utilize deception extensively, but Israel is is a league of its own.
Originally posted by giant
But Iraq was easy compared to all of this. All of the admin claims on quantity and capability came from the UN inspections and, if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the only reason anyone came to the conclusion Iraq was hiding anything was, as I've already pointed out, the mistake of taking Wohlstetter's ideas concerning a nuclear standoff in a bipolar world and applying them to a variety of small, diverse groups and nations.
There are several lines of your argument I?d like to be illuminated?let?s start with Wohlstetter. Now, all I know about Wohlsetter is that he was the leading 50s-70s theorist on nuclear war strategy, a critic of MAD, and a mentor to several foreign policy thinkers, e.g. Wolfawietz and Pearle (spes?) (my previous exposure to those theories have been through the writings of H. Kahn and an occasional article in specialized periodicals).
My first question is:
What were, and how were his ideas that have been ?misapplied? in the current context?
Originally posted by MaxParrish
There are several lines of your argument I?d like to be illuminated?let?s start with Wohlstetter. Now, all I know about Wohlsetter is that he was the leading 50s-70s theorist on nuclear war strategy, a critic of MAD, and a mentor to several foreign policy thinkers, e.g. Wolfawietz and Pearle (spes?) (my previous exposure to those theories have been through the writings of H. Kahn and an occasional article in specialized periodicals).
My first question is:
What were, and how were his ideas that have been ?misapplied? in the current context?
It's actually pretty simple. Wohlstetter's central thesis was that we need to have a zero margin of error in a nuclear world. This meant you had to deal with every situation according to the worst-case scenario. Wolfowitz argued that this should be applied to proliferation and, more shockingly, power.
The other major influence was Shulsky's (and all of the other straussians, including wolfowitz) interpretation of Strauss with regard to intelligence, essentially adopting a hyper-paranoid view of intel where you assume that basically everything is complete deception and the only way to get any info is to read between the lines.
The biggest problem with how these views were adopted was the extreme to which they were (are) followed. Iraq was an open book, and that was obvious. Certain individuals in the US government were too blinded by these ideological beliefs to realize that.*
Brzezinski described the problems with this very well at the NASSP conference:
The second condition, troubling condition, which contributes in my view to the crisis of credibility and to the state of isolation in which the United States finds itself today is due in part because that skewed view of the world is intensified by a fear that periodically verges on panic that is in itself blind. By this I mean the absence of a clearly, sharply defined perception of what is transpiring abroad regarding particularly such critically important security issues as the existence or the spread or the availability or the readiness in alien hands of weapons of mass destruction.
We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States. That failure was contributed to and was compensated for by extremist demagogy which emphasizes the worst case scenarios which stimulates fear, which induces a very simple dichotomic view of world reality.
*This is not to say that there was no deception, since clearly there was. But the primary thrust was in the opposite direction with Saddam working to make it appear Iraq was better armed than it was.
Originally posted by giant
Iraq has been an open book for a long time. In fact, now that we are there we can see that everything we knew before was exactly what was going on.
WRONG!
It's exactly the opposite. And if you did even the most elementary thinking about the subject let alone have access to intelligence information, you would know that. Saddam used intelligence deception very successfully, and the fact that the US is now having to pump unforeseen billions into that project testifies to that successful deception.